The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Played

Every Sunday, the rector of my church appends a brief note of spiritual guidance to the weekly bulletin. Recently, he noted that whereas “the world” encourages individuals to satisfy their desires, the Scriptures teach that we’re often to deny those desires.

That generality—“the world.”

I get it. I appreciate the New Testament connotation of the “world” as distinct from the church and its principles and disciplines. Still, I don’t think it’s quite right. “The world,” depending on where you live and which tradition you may or may not have been raised in, says a lot of different things. American consumerist culture, on the other hand, very definitely does encourage us—entice us, seduce us—to satisfy our desires. That culture is now global and, on balance, I think material human welfare is vastly better for it.

Thinking holistically of the human person, however, consumerism, with its valorization of individual choice and autonomy, is spiritually problematic.

And so it’s a great and terrible irony that the church—I should specify, a large segment of the conservative Protestant church—has invited “the world” into the church. It has embedded its economic imperatives into its doctrines. Indeed, it has elevated the marketplace into a thing affirmed and designed by God himself.

With characteristic brilliance, Patrick Deneen shone a klieg light on this “delicious irony,” with his post on the Hobby Lobby contraception case currently before the Supreme Court. A self-styled “religious corporation” seeks

to push back against the State’s understanding of humans as radically autonomous, individuated, biologically sterile, and even hostile to their offspring. For that “religious corporation” operates in an economic system in which it has been wholly disembedded from a pervasive moral and religious context. Its “religion” is no less individuated and “disembedded” than the conception of the self being advanced by the State. It defends its religious views as a matter of individual conscience, of course, because there is no moral, social, or religious context to which it can appeal beyond the autonomy of its own religious belief. Lacking any connecting moral basis on which to stake a social claim, all it can do in the context of a society of “disembeddedness” is seek an exemption from the general practice of advancing radical autonomy. Yet, the effort to secure an exemption is itself already a concession to the very culture and economy of autonomy.

Deneen of course is a conservative Catholic. I’ve yet to come across a rejoinder from a conservative Protestant arguing against Deneen’s contention that there is, or should be, a “separation of church and economy.” If no one has written it yet, someone will soon. For this is an unfortunate, ahistorical, heretical bedrock belief of the conservative base: the American economy is God’s economy. Any attempt to regulate it is contrary to the God-breathed Constitution. It is atheistic, humanistic, and tyrannical.

It’s part of the peculiarly Puritan legacy that washed up on these shores, so subsequently useful for self-justification. It goes like this: Should one be materially blessed, one gives thanks to God. This associates by inference that God has chosen to reward some, but obviously not others. If God was well-pleased to withhold blessings from some, He had good reason. Material blessing is therefore associated with pleasing God and doing good, while not having those blessings, displeasing Him and therefore being guilty. Thus, the poor are to be despised and helping them wrong, for doing so would be to go against God’s will. Since God’s blessings are available to everyone, clearly they are the authors of their own misfortune.

At the root of this trick is an intellectual incapacity: it is the simple failure to understand that markets are social institutions. This is why we have a perpetual fantasy on the libertarian Right about constructing a system of ‘pure’ free markets, unpolluted by the ugly, godless, work of actually regulating them and hence spoiling their heavenly purity.
But if markets do not actually exist in nature, how do you construct them? By way of local, state-level, and federal legislation.
Once you have worked this out, the only question that really matters is: how do we construct markets so that they promote our genuine, collective purposes, instead of corrupting and destroying them?
The great irony here is that the massive (over)extension of markets in recent decades has been driven directly by the State. The reason that students on campuses today think of themselves as consumers buying educational products, and professors see themselves as independent profit centers bringing in research $$, is that the State has deliberately turned the sacred realm of education into another debased and morally corrupted sphere of The Market. Exactly the same principle was behind the ‘workfare’ reforms of the 1990s, with the welfare system basically working as a feeder to the lowest end of the job market. But I won’t bore you with that because nobody really gives a sh!t about people on welfare.

My personal belief, said many times in the conservative blogosphere, has always been that the true passion of christ was revealed when he lost his temper in the church. We crucified him for it. He asked forgiveness for us since we did not understand what we were doing. I wonder that we never really learned to understand and despair that the chances we will understand in the future appear to be diminishing as we leave the world of creation on our journey to, in my estimation, a hell that we make for ourselves in augvirtuality. Who, or what will tell us what god’s will is there? In the meantime, the rains are coming, the leaves and flowers are budding and, well, I just got to sneeze god willing or not.

As for Hobby Lobby, they are merely playing by the rules issued by the zeitgeist. You say the state has no right to impose its morality, well, then the state has no right to impose its morality on those it dislikes.

Ilya Shapiro, The Cato Institute,
“These individuals don’t check their religious values at the office door…The government can’t force individuals to forfeit their free exercise rights when they incorporate a business – just as it can’t force them to forsake these liberties when they enter the workforce, attend school, or engage in any other secular pursuit.”

Good insights, but one minor quibble. As a historian, I think that making the point that the “moral superiority of the market” is an ahistorical belief goes a bit too far. Many conservatives have been uncertain about the destructive forces of the market place. How the opposite belief came to be orthodox is very much an historical phenomenon.

There needs to be a distinction between “capitalism as a religion” and “capitalism as lack of government”. Thanks to Ayn Rand, most young conservatives get their mind polluted by the former, and that’s why we have these Daily Paul type do-what-thou-wilt atheists.

As selfishness takes over, ideology is abandoned for personal convenience. Liberalism/neoconism takes over your life as big government makes life easy for you. I’m sure the Daily Paul types will inevitably become neocons or liberals.

This is why most libertarians are pro-choice (or promote the Rothbard/Block baby farms). It also explains the switch from the Founders’ system of 14-year copyright grants into the “intellectual property” system of today – you claim the right to control other people’s use of purchased products and invade the privacy of their homes under threat of fines and imprisonment.

I think a lot of this has to do with the great Communist powers that arose – the USSR, and the PRC – being officially atheist and formally persecuting Christians.

Thus, many conservatives came to conflate “anti-religion” with “anti-free market” … and for a variety of reasons (from simplicity to lazy thinking to successful propagandizing) came to equate “pro-Christianity” with “pro-free market”.

Into that space succesfully grew the mega-churches, media empires preaching self-empowerment in tandem with Christs love.

And after all – paying some undocumented immigrants to pick up your cross and throw it in the back of your HumVee for you, and then driving it around, is a lot more practical than actually picking it up and carrying it on your shoulders!

And so it’s a great and terrible irony that the church—I should specify, a large segment of the conservative Protestant church—has invited “the world” into the church. It has embedded its economic imperatives into its doctrines. Indeed, it has elevated the marketplace into a thing affirmed and designed by God himself.”

I do not think there is any evidence that this is case overall. And I am going to attend my comments o fundamentalist churches. What these churches have has recognized that one’s relationship with god is individualized. That each person as individual has value. And in empowered by God abilities, not excluding economic ability including wealth.

That the idea that my Christianity must resign me to some state of impoverishment is not a conditional state or even desired by god. That is not the same as elevating wealth to equality with or above god.

The liberalmind hasmade a gd deal of advanced on the worldly assumption that being a Christian should look like something akin to sackcloth and ashes preaching o street corners. That is not the case.

Rather, that being a Christian one has access to all of God’s resources and they are available for him to better engage his fellow man not merely himself, especially his or her members of the church, most immediate and important one’s own family. How such wealth is managed.

Ultimately as with all maters of wealth — it is a mater of conscience and one’s relationship with Godd’s expectation on that individual.

“It also explains the switch from the Founders’ system of 14-year copyright grants into the “intellectual property” system of today – you claim the right to control other people’s use of purchased products and invade the privacy of their homes under threat of fines and imprisonment.”

I would like to see this comment fleshed out a bit more if possible, to belter get the point.

I hope that video is not supposed to be evidence for “…the American economy is God’s economy. Any attempt to regulate it is contrary to the God-breathed Constitution. It is atheistic, humanistic, and tyrannical.” I mean, it starts out with a bunch of non-Americans, insists that business and property owners be ‘good stewards’ and ‘serve others’, says nothing about regulation, and in general seems like a Christian Fundamentalist gloss on things Milton Friedman would have agreed with. I especially liked the story about the OT king who wanted to confiscate a vinyard — really does show that the ancient Hebrews had a sense of private property.

It does get one thing wrong — Christ himself didn’t care about equal pay for equal work — see the parable of the Vineyard workers. The boss can pay whatever he wants and if workers agree to it, they got no right to complain. Your man-god is a strict contract man-god.